UK Team

The Unit for Social and Community Psychiatry (QMUL)

The Unit for Social and Community Psychiatry conducts research on how social interactions can reduce and overcome mental distress. Social interactions are understood as everything that ‘happens between people’ which includes interactions in societies, communities, groups, families and health care settings. The research is multi-disciplinary, aims to innovate and involves the development and testing of novel interventions in mental health care. The Unit plays a leading role in various national and international collaborations.

The Unit is also involved in teaching, and in the planning, evaluation and improvement of mental health services. Since 2012, the Unit is a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre (the only one specifically for Mental Health Service Development worldwide), and since 2017 it hosts an NIHR Global Health Research Group for Developing Psycho-Social Interventions.

Since 2013, the Unit has generated more than £25m competitive research, mostly from the National Institute for Health Research, the European Commission and the Medical Research Council.

Stefan Priebe

s.priebe@qmul.ac.uk

Professor Stefan Priebe
Chief Investigator
Unit for Social and Community Psychiatry Newham Centre for Mental Health, QMUL

Stefan Priebe graduated in Psychology and Medicine, and qualified as Neurologist, Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist. He was Head of the Department of Social Psychiatry at the Free University Berlin, before in 1997 taking up his current position as Professor for Social and Community Psychiatry at Queen Mary, University of London. He is also Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Mental Health Service Development and of a NIHR Global Health Research Group.

His research group in East London runs several programmes, mainly studying how social interactions can be utilized to reduce mental distress. This involves the development and evaluation of novel psycho-social interventions, e.g. he developed the DIALOG+ intervention which makes routine patient-clinician meetings therapeutically effective.

Victoria Bird

v.j.bird@qmul.ac.uk

Professor Victoria Bird
Co-Principal Investigator
Unit for Social and Community Psychiatry Newham Centre for Mental Health, QMUL

Victoria is a lecturer in Mental Health Care at Queen Mary University of London. She is currently a Principal Investigator on a number of trials including global health projects assessing resource-oriented approaches to community mental health care.

Her research interests include quality of life for people with chronic mental and physical health conditions and global approaches to community based mental health care.

Cat Fung

c.fung@qmul.ac.uk

Programme Manager
Unit for Social and Community Psychiatry Newham Centre for Mental Health, QMUL

Catherine has an MA in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford and is a qualified psychological wellbeing-practitioner. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Unit for Social and Community Psychiatry and programme manager for OLA. At the Unit, she was previously project manager for the NIHR Global Health Research Group on Developing Psycho-Social Interventions, working with partners in Uganda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Peru, Argentina and Pakistan. She has also worked at King’s College London as a researcher with people with severe mental illness, and at iCope Camden Psychological Therapies Service using low intensity cognitive behavioural interventions with people experiencing depression and anxiety. She is interested in the role of the arts (particularly music) in mental health, and involving families and technologies to improve mental health care.

Erin Burn

e.burn@qmul.ac.uk

Researcher
Unit for Social and Community Psychiatry Newham Centre for Mental Health, QMUL

Erin has an MSc in Health Psychology from the University of Sussex, and over 7 years of experience working in research, public health, mental health care and project management. Erin is currently a researcher at the Unit for Social and Community Psychiatry (USCP), working on two MRC funded projects: OLA and BRiCs. At the USCP she was previously a researcher for the NIHR Global Health Research Group on Developing Psycho-Social Interventions, and at UCL as a research assistant on a project aiming to improve adherence to anti-retroviral therapy in adults who are HIV+. Her research interests include global health, adolescent research and arts-based research methodology.

Dili Stanislaus

d.s.sureshkumar@qmul.ac.uk

Research Assistant
Unit for Social and Community Psychiatry Newham Centre for Mental Health, QMUL

Dili has an MSc in Global Mental Health from King’s College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is currently a research assistant at the Unit for Social and Community Psychiatry, working on two MRC funded projects: OLA and BRiCs. Her research interests include global mental health, psychological interventions and adolescent mental health.

Pragmatic Clinical Trials Unit (PCTU)

The Pragmatic Clinical Trials Unit (PCTU) Queen Mary University London has been conducting clinical trials and other research studies since the 1990s. The unit obtained reistrations with the UK Clinical Research Collaboration in 2007, and has been funded by the National Institute for Health Research since 2008. Since then, the PCTU has expanded to lead and collaborate in a large number of multi-centre trials and other studies across many clinical areas. PCTU studies were initially focused in primary care and mental health. Over time the unit’s clinical strengths have expanded to include women’s health, colorectal surgery, and most recently, critical care and perioperative medicine.

Sandra Eldridge

s.eldridge@qmul.ac.uk

Reverand Professor Sandra Eldridge
Co-applicant / Statistician
Pragmatic Clincal Trials Unit at Barts and London School of Medicine and Dentristy, QMUL

Sandra is Professor of Biostatistics and Director of the Pragmatic Clinical Trials Unit at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry. She is also Associate Dean for Strategic Developments and the lead for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion within the School, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners, and an NIHR Senior Investigator. She has sat on the Royal Statistical Society’s Council, the Society for Academic Primary Care Executive, and various NIHR funding panels. Sandra has an international reputation as a trial statistician with interests in cluster randomised trials, pilot and feasibility studies and pragmatic trials. She leads the collaboration that developed the CONSORT extension for pilot trials and leads the adaptation of the new Cochrane Risk of Bias tool to cluster randomised trials.

People’s Palace Projects

Is a research centre on arts and social justice based in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London, and a National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) of Arts Council England. It engages over 87,000 participants and 568 artists/organisations and has implemented award-winning projects on armed conflict and with young people in social care.

Through participatory artistic projects, performances, educational initiatives, and debates, PPP seeks to transform people’s lives and realities. It brings together artists, activists, academics, and audiences for projects that address a wide array of social justice and human rights issues.

PPP works primarily with people from vulnerable territories in the UK and other LMICs countries, especially in Brazil, promoting cultural and knowledge exchange. Recent outstanding projects include a partnership with the Kuikuro community to produce an artistic residency and exchange programme that created an immersive digital experience for London museumgoers; partnership with the Brazilian NGO Redes da Maré in a set of projects, including research on Violence Against Women and Girls; and support the UK adaptation of Agência de Redes programme, which supports young people to set up social enterprise projects (The Agency).

Paul Heritage

p.heritage@peoplespalace.org.uk

Artistic Director
People’s Palace Projects

For over three decades, Paul Heritage has created cultural projects as an investigation of the power of the arts in social change, including award-winning HIV/AIDS, education and human rights work. Paul is noted for his prison projects in Britain and Brazil, reaching tens of thousands of prisoners, guards, and their families with work on arts and human rights; and for his work with AfroReggae in Brazil and the UK from 2001-2012.

In recent years, he has focused increasingly on the relationships between arts and wellbeing, Creative Economy, preservation and artistic exchange between artists and cultural agents in Brazil and the UK and indigenous communities in Central Brazil. Besides OLA, he is currently leading on and contributing to other three studies on the arts contributions to mental health, in Brazil, India, Pakistan and the UK.

Mariana Willmersdorf Steffen

mariana@pppdobrasil.org.br

Project Manager and Research Assistant
People’s Palace Projects

Mariana has a Msc in Public Policies from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). She has five years of experience contributing to research projects on the creative economy, cultural policies and the arts, working with the Brazilian Ministry of Culture and other national cultural organisations. Believing that arts and culture have an important role in promoting a better and fairer world, she is particularly interested in their contributions to mental health and wellbeing of subjects and communities.

She is currently Project manager and Research assistant at People’s Palace Projects, working in projects that explore the different values of culture and the impacts of arts in mental health.

Kings College London

The Health Service and Population Research Department (HSPR) conducts world-leading research and education using the social and health sciences to better understand and to improve health outcomes, systems, and care, both locally and globally, particularly in disadvantages and marginalised populations. HSPR is multi-disciplinary, including health care professionals, epidemiologists, economists, implementation scientists, qualitative methodologists, service users, social scientists, and statisticians, and we work with academic, clinical, and policy organisations locally, in London and the UK, and internationally, in low, middle, and high-income countries.

Craig Morgan

craig.morgan@kcl.ac.uk

Professor Craig Morgan
Co-applicant
Health Service and Population Research Department, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London

Craig Morgan is Professor of Social Epidemiology, Head of the Health Service and Population Research Department at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, and Co-Director of the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health. He has previously held a MRC Special Training Fellowship in Health Services Research, and completed his PhD in Social Psychiatry, at the Institute of Psychiatry. His research is focused on social and cultural influences on the onset, course and outcome of mental disorders, particularly during adolescence, and he has led multi-country programmes on these topics, funded by, among others, the MRC, Wellcome Trust, European Union, and ESRC. He has published over 200 academic papers on these topics, and edited two books, Society and Psychosis, published by Cambridge University Press, and Principles of Social Psychiatry, published by Wiley-Blackwell. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology.

Ricardo Araya

ricardo.araya@kcl.ac.uk

Professor Ricardo Araya
Co-applicant
Health Service and Population Research Department, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London

Professor Araya’s research interests include the aetiology of common mental disorders, inequalities and their link to the mental health of populations with special emphasis on international comparisons, and effective treatments for common mental disorders, such as simple and brief interventions using non-medical workers and strong community participation. Several of his current projects use technological platforms to support the delivery of mental health interventions. He is involved in projects in a large number of countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. He has a special interest in projects that integrate mental health problems in the care of other diseases i.e. hypertension, diabetes, HIV and so on.

University College London

Division of Psychiatry

The Division of Psychiatry at UCL is an interdisciplinary centre for research and teaching concerned with mental health and illness. Our aim is to address clinical problems in order to achieve benefits for patients and public health, using insights from basic science.

James Kirkbride

j.kirkbride@ucl.ac.uk

Dr James Kirkbride
Co-applicant
Division of Psychiatry, UCL.

James Kirkbride is currently a Reader in Epidemiology in the Division of Psychiatry at UCL. He has previously held a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship (UCL, 2014-18) and Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship (University of Cambridge, 2009-13). Currently he works with Swedish, UK and Canadian cohort data and is involved in active MRC projects in Latin America and South Africa. He has previously led two major studies of first episode psychosis (SEPEA, EU-GEI) as well as the PsyMaptic population-based FEP prediction tool (www.psymaptic.org).

James is a psychiatric epidemiologist with a background in social science, having completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 2007. He previously obtained an M.Sc. in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2003). Prior to that, he obtained a First Class Honours degree in Geography, Business and the Environment at the University of Nottingham (2002).